Independent Ally: Australia in an Age of Power Transition by Shannon Tow

The most common perception of Australia’s alliance with the United States is one of dependence. This is both the folk tale heard in pubs and the title of the most acclaimed academic study of the alliance – Coral Bell’s Dependent Ally. In Independent Ally Shannon Tow takes careful aim at this perception, puncturing it thoroughly. This book is therefore a valuable contribution to understanding the scope, flexibility and constraints of Australian foreign policy over the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

While the folk tale image of dependence has been critiqued widely, this book tackles the harder task: academic assumptions of dependence. Tow notes that ‘power transition theory and alliance theory both suggest that the more a junior ally values its alliance, the more likely it is to want to preserve the alliance by presenting itself as a loyal ally and by eschewing ties with a rising power or another external power’. Across six case studies, she shows that Australian diplomatic history reveals a starkly different pattern. Read the full article »

China Matters: Getting it Right for Australia by Bates Gill, Linda Jakobson

“Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder” – George Washington in ‘Hamilton’, by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Australia’s debate about China has in some ways, been about the easy stuff: War, death and destruction. Notions of being trapped in conflict and nuclear war have quickly risen to the foreground of our public debates. If there was a conflict, Australia’s choices would be straight forward. Outside exceptional circumstances —such as an unprovoked US strike on Beijing— Australia would be involved and support its treaty ally and fellow democracies.

But if those issues are relatively simple, managing the peace, keeping it, and living comfortably within it, will be much more difficult. China will matter each and every single day from now until either they collapse or we do. In their timely new book, China Matters: Getting it right for Australia, Bates Gill and Linda Jakobson spell out the many difficulties this peacetime relationship poses, from China’s growing economic significance and military power to its soft power interference inside Australia. Read the full article »

The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania by Nicholas Clements

The Black War is the name given to the conflict between the indigenous population of Tasmania and their conflict with the European settlers. It ran from around 1824 to 1831 and represents both the largest military operation on Australian soil and a brutal guerrilla conflict. It also featured fear, lust, paranoia and despair on both sides.

The most striking feature of this book is that every chapter is equally divided between telling the story of Whites and Blacks. This clever device allows Clements’ to explore, explain and ultimately sympathise with both sides.

Lest anyone be confused, or willing to believe indulgent lies, the moral scales are heavily weighted in one direction. The Tasmanian aborigines lived for 33’000 years on this remote island, yet survived barely 30 more after white colonialists arrived. They faced not only the destruction of their lives, but also their cultures, their way of life. The final years must have been as miserable as any people have lived, in the face of a relentless and ever strengthening opponent.

Engaging the neighbours: Australia and ASEAN since 1974 by Frank Frost

Engaging the Neighbours: is the definitive history of Australia’s attempts to work with and through ASEAN. An institution often mocked for its style, but which has been critical for the security and prosperity of the region.

Australians often describe their nation as facing a choice between its security and economic partners. Yet as Frank Frost details, for everything but the risk of a major power attack on Australia, ASEAN is Australia’s main security partner. Whether the issue is regional conflicts, keeping the major powers from competing in Southeast Asia, irregular migration, drug smuggling or terrorism, ASEAN has been the vehicle for Australia to find security in Asia and with Asia.

At times, Australia has been the ‘odd man in’, pushing for change in a way the rest of the region was not comfortable with. Sometimes our patience has been rewarded, such as with Australian contributions on the Cambodian peace accords or the creation of APEC. At other times, such as Kevin Rudd’s ill-fated Asia-Pacific Community proposal, the divergence has been a source of embarrassment for Canberra.Read the full article »

It’s 9:29pm on a Friday night. I’ve had dinner, watched a movie, and finished a glass of wine. And yet two minutes ago, I sat down at my computer and checked my work email.

Everywhere we look, computers are changing the face of work. We are plugging them into existing machines so they can drive themselves. We are custom building machines to enable them to manufacture everything from iPods to houses. And mere software itself is replacing human workers, spitting out stock reports or providing medical advice.

According to Tim Dunlop, there are three ways we as a society are responding to this change. The ‘Business as usual’ school of thought recognises the change, sees there’s a profit to be made from it, and hopes that our historical experience —where machines create as many jobs as they consume— will hold. The ‘Back to the future’ school by contrast pines for the industrial era, rails against ‘neoliberalism’, and want protectionism and a large welfare state to manage the disruption.

Neither is that attractive or coherent as a world view. Instead, argues Dunlop the future needs to be ‘Workless’. In this engaging and accessible book, Dunlop argues that we need to fundamentally re-think how society is organised if we are to manage and indeed benefit from the radical changes occurring in who does the labour of our society.Read the full article »

Game Plan: The Case for a New Australian Grand Strategy by Ross Babbage

You may not know the author of Game Plan, Ross Babbage, but you know his work. The ‘Defence of Australia’ policy was built by many hands, but in the words of Des Ball, Babbage was the ‘conceptual leader’. In ‘Game Plan: The case for a new Australian grand strategy’, Dr Babbage signals his view that defending Australia now requires a new set of overseas hands, primarily from the United States.

Babbage’s strategic evolution has been a long time coming. His PhD thesis, dozens of papers, chapters and books such as the widely acclaimed ‘Rethinking Australia’s Defence’ and ‘A Coast Too Long: Defending Australia Beyond the 1990s’ were key contributions to the development of Australian defence policy from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

To be sure, the US alliance was always a vital part of this policy. It was ‘self-reliance’ not ‘independence’. But the weight was on Australia to show that it was up to the task of its protecting its front yard. While Paul Dibb, Richard Brabin-Smith and others fleshed out the force structure details, Babbage, Ball and others drove the conceptual debates, along with bouncing around the Northern Territory identifying how the terrain could be protected and the best technology for doing so.Read the full article »

In the field of ‘big-picture’ books by journalists about Australian politics, Paul Kelly is the hall of famer who still rightly claims attention. But the rising star is George Megalogenis.

Megageorge as he is widely known has recently produced two important books. The Longest Decade told the counter-narrative story of the similarities between Paul Keating and John Howard. So good was it that I believe Paul Kelly paid it the ultimate compliment by trying to write the same tale in his own The March of Patriots. Megalogenis then returned the favour by retelling the story of Kelly’s The End of Certainty, examining and advocating for the liberalisation of the Australian economy in The Australia Moment.

In Australia’s Second Chance Megalogenis has again set out for new territory, arguing that Australia’s prosperity and success depends not just on being an open country economically but an open country for migrants. The book shows that Australia was and always has been a nation defined by migration. This, alongside the question of population is a central element of the nation’s success.Read the full article »

“The current crop of my Federal Parliamentary colleagues has produced a superabundance of books. Admittedly, most belong either to the category of rather dull and worthy policy blueprints for Australia’s future, of the kind rising backbenchers are wont to write to advertise their intellectual wares; or memoirs of the “where did it all go so wrong – it certainly wasn’t my fault” variety”.

Given the timing, I suspect Brandis had Two Futures in mind with this line. For all the proliferation of blame sharing memoirs —particularly from the previous government— there are very few real policy blueprints around. Mark Latham made his name by writing them, and Cory Bernardi has tried the same — though I regret reading the former, and won’t read the latter.

Two Futures by Clare O’Neil and Tim Watts is therefore to be welcomed as a relatively rare break from the pack. Both were elected in 2013, but are already well regarded by insiders. Their book justifies that by trying to think through six big issues Australia must manage: Democracy, Inequality, Technology, Climate, (Economic) Growth, and The World.Read the full article »

One lesson I have come to learn in my brief time in academia is that it is not wise to just try and write ‘about’ a subject, with the hope the argument or insights will come later. There’s often a pressure to contribute your name to the current debates, but unless you really have something to say, the result is often more generic, less engaging and less memorable than you’d hope.

This was my surprising reaction to Coral Bell’s Dependent Ally: A Study in Australian Foreign Policy. Widely regarded as the classic work on the alliance, I got the feeling reading it that Bell wanted to write about the alliance (having done so indirectly for much of her career), but didn’t really have anything urgent to say.

The title of the book suggests a demonstration of Australia’s reliance on the UK and US. That is a theme, but it’s assumed as much as argued. Typical of Bell though, this book contains an original take on the issue. Rather than identify the cause of Australia’s dependence in a psychological need for security as the Left argues, Bell places it in the global lot of middle powers in a hierarchical world. Australia contributes to the global balance of power via its connection to the large states.Read the full article »

Bob Carr’s central complaint during his time as Foreign Minister (my review of his Diary here) was not the travel, food or company, but a lack of time. 18 months was too short to do anything he moaned. Percy Spender had just 16 months and was the most influential Australian Foreign Minister of the 20th century.

Spender is something of a forgotten figure in Australian history. This is partly because his time at the top was so short, but also because his story runs against the dominant narrative of his era. We think of the Menzies reign as British, cautious and somewhat lethargic. Spender was none of these things.

In this highly readable — albeit academic — biography, David Lowe illuminates a figure who is brash, bold and innovative. Spender was willing to take risks, worked at racehorse pace (often managing a federal parliamentary seat and significant caseload at the NSW bar) and challenged many of the fundamental ideas of his time.Read the full article »

Like most of my generation I grew up watching Bush Tucker Man. A fun show, with a serious purpose: working out how do defend Australia. While Les Hiddins was the khaki front man, it was the geek squad like Ross Babbage who made the idea a reality.

It might seem a simple idea ‘design your forces to defend the country’ but putting it into practice requires a lot of thought. Especially in a country as big and diverse as Australia. While Hiddins looked at gathering ‘tucker’, Babbage and others looked at the tides, winds, bridges, population centres, and tried to work out how they could help national strategy and force structure.

It is strange to some today, but during the Cold War Australians held a real fear of invasion. We’ve largely discarded that concern now (See the Lowy Poll 2015), but by reading books like this, you can see how authentic such concerns were.Read the full article »

Many reasons have been offered for why the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government fell short, but fundamentally I believe it came down to a failure of governance. They had smart, capable people, there were good ideas and policies and no shortage of hard work. But they couldn’t put it together in a sustained or effective fashion.

‘No Minister: So you want to be a chief of staff’ helps show exactly what that means. To be clear, Behm’s purpose is not to explain what went wrong, but rather try and show how to make government work, at least from within a single Minister’s office. Behm spends much of the book explaining how he set about his task as Greg Combet’s Chief of Staff, and how he thinks about issues of leadership, management, and building an efficient, trusting, value-driven team.

Behm’s position in the Minister for Climate Change’s office was always something of an oddity around Canberra. As Allan reveals early on, the intention had been for Combet to take over the Defence Portfolio, hence bringing in the ‘bow-tied assassin’* who offered a deep knowledge of the Defence organisation, the public service and a fine strategic mind.Read the full article »

City Limits: Why Australia’s cities are broken and how we can fix them by Jane-Frances Kelly, Paul Donegan

We have become a nation of Two Australia’s. But the divide is not based on class, skin colour, or wealth (per say) but on how close to the CBD you live. Those in close enjoy access to good jobs, access to good services, high house values, higher levels of gender equality at work and lower work-life balance issues. Those further out suffer in all these areas.

This is a fantastic, if scary book. It combines several of the biggest issues of modern Australian life, and shows how they are centrally connected to our cities, and how we are comprehensively failing to address them.

The argument begins by noting that while the knowledge-economy was thought to have enabled us to all work ‘anywhere, anytime’, in fact it has pushed us towards the CBD. Where manufacturing let people live in the suburbs near the big plants, today’s economy forces everyone to head to a central point. So much so that 80% of Australia’s economy now occurs on 0.2% of our land.Read the full article »

I’m delighted to announce the release of my next book, ‘Winning the Peace: Australia’s campaign to change the Asia-Pacific‘, published by Melbourne University Press.

Winning the Peace seeks to explore and explain how Australian governments, during the modern period of Australia’s engagement with Asia (from 1983 till today), have attempted to use their defence and foreign policies to shape the region. While there were certainly times of tension during this period, such as the spikes around the end of the Cold War and during the early years of the War on Terror, the region has been largely defined by peace. Because of this peace and thanks to Australia’s relative size as a ‘middle power’, the government’s attempt to change how other states act and think was not sought through the deployment or use of force but through military and diplomatic engagement and persuasion.

Australia’s smaller size meant it had to be strategic in its efforts. It had to determine which changes were priorities, it had to re-organise and develop its resources, it had to deploy them effectively and efficiently, and it had to be able to sustain the effort in the face of competition and rejection. This book focuses on the three main ‘campaigns’ the Australian government has undertaken since the early 1980s to reshape the Asia-Pacific in pursuit of its national interests.